Antitrust and upstream platform power plays - a policy in bed with procrustes

Ubiquitous digital platforms are fundamentally altering our ways of life. Competition policy-makers, though, are on edge. Among the many issues they are considering, one matter has remained under-appreciated: “upstream” effects. Powerful platforms, consensus has it, are now (or inevitably will be) marshalling our digital markets. They have apparently also found new ways to decimate competition and harm our wallets, menu options, privacy and autonomy. But while antirust academics are furiously debating how best to address such consumer concerns, policy-makers are also reacting to worries expressed by another group of stakeholders, namely (allegedly) victimized suppliers – app developers, merchants, drivers, couriers (etc.), as well as dependent content providers (like Spotify or Yelp), without whom the powerful platforms would have little to attract consumers. This thesis, then, is about antitrust and its application to such “upstream” concerns. Prosaically: are upstream platform power plays really relevant antitrust problems? The answer would certainly be quite obvious if contemporary (pre-platform) antitrust theory and practice were anything to go by. Supplier-side anxieties have indeed been all but written off the policy agenda for the brick-and-mortar economy. Moreover, academic consensus still has it that provider interests cannot be the touchstone of antitrust. Today, though, policy-maker attitudes seem to be shifting. Inasmuch as antitrust is the envisaged response, we need a policy introspection to make some sense of what is going on. To this end, the analysis offered here is altogether normative, theoretical and practical. Normative because it engages in a supplier-mindful soul-searching exercise, which advances our understanding of antitrust’s foundations; theoretical as it sheds evidence-based insights on upstream effects and develops new frameworks for rationalizing them; practical since it takes a deep dive into the complex antitrust machinery and reveals how “looking up” exacerbates key difficulties that have long been the source of occasional seize ups.